Sunday, May 7, 2017

Fresh off a big victory with the House passage of an ObamaCare repeal, Trump is also getting lucky again in his enemies. Hillary Clinton is baaack and ready to rumble.

Politico reports she is launching a new group to raise money for the resistance to Trump’s presidency. The group will be called Onward Together, and Clinton is said to be meeting with donors to form a board of directors.

Her cadre of unemployed hangers-on must be thrilled to have a new slush fund, but most Dems are probably thinking, “Haven’t we suffered enough?”

With the party demoralized and divided, and holding the fewest number of elected seats in a century, Clinton’s return will likely prolong the misery. While she’s a media magnet, she’s also a political dead end, having lost two presidential runs and ceded the future to the Bernie Sanders’ socialist wing.

It’s hard to imagine her as the party’s savior, yet, instead of going away quietly, she’ll be competing with its candidates for money and attention. Anything she gets will come at the expense of new leaders and ideas.

On the other hand, what’s bad for Dems is great for Trump. Clinton’s decision to jump back into partisan politics is a gift to the president.

With polls showing little buyers’ remorse over the election, any contrast between the sitting president and his defeated opponent favors him. Especially because Clinton is stuck in the same tiresome blame game that helped cost her the election.

After weeks of inching her way back, she gave an interview last week at a Women for Women event. Her explanation for why she lost shows that the new Hillary is the same as the old Hillary.

Full of finger-pointing and excuses, she was, as usual, devoid of any concession about her own shortcomings.

She has shifted the entire e-mail scandal, which she created by deciding to use a private server and lying about it to the public, to the shoulders of Russian hackers and FBI Director Jim Comey. To hear her tell it, she was an innocent victim of their skullduggery.

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“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” she said, insisting that Comey’s Oct. 28 letter reopening the probe into her handling of classified material “raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.”

While Clinton said she accepted “absolute personal responsibility” for the defeat, it certainly didn’t sound as if she meant it.

She refused to second-guess her strategy or message, didn’t talk about her flaws as a candidate, didn’t explain why she never got what was bugging working-class voters or why she assumed black voters would turn out for her the same way they turned out for Barack Obama.

Instead, she added “misogyny” and the media to her list of scapegoats. And of course she trotted out the unproven Trump-Putin connection.

None of her spiel is new or different, and it leads me to conclude she has an unhealthy fixation on an election do-over. As improbable as it seems, I believe she wants to co-opt the Trump resistance and make it her base for a potential 2020 run.

Look at it this way: What are the chances Clinton is going back to battle to help elect Cory Booker or Andrew Cuomo in 2020? Zero and none.

Raising and controlling money is Step One to her comeback, a step the Clintons have mastered. A Democratic operative once described them this way: “Fish gotta swim, and the Clintons gotta raise money.”

That was after they had rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, allegedly sold presidential pardons and turned the family foundation into a money-printing press.

The Onward Together venture would fit the pattern, with self-promotion and private-jet perks guaranteed. By vacuuming up bags of cash and deciding who is worthy of it, she would be in a strong position to control the party.

It’s a bold move, but it could retard Dems’ rebuilding efforts. For one thing, there is no obvious space for her, with Sanders still active and with Obama heir Tom Perez running the national committee.

Even a Clinton funding success could spell trouble. She would be a juicy target for Republicans in the 2018 midterms, forcing Dem candidates to run from her in swing districts where she remains a pariah.

There also will be inevitable temptations with her new group. Like her family foundation, Onward Together probably will be free of donor and spending limits.

That could make it ripe for a repeat of the foundation’s sordid side. Amid its stench from selling access and favors, insider e-mails showed the foundation served as a front for “Bill Clinton Inc.,” with the former president using it to set up lucrative speaking and consultant gigs that brought him tens of millions of dollars.

Still, the foundation had some charity works, which Hillary cited during the campaign to turn away criticism. But now that she’s free to spend her time on them, she’s focusing on a cause closer to her heart: a third race for the White House.

ALI BRELAND A Democratic congressman hammered Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg , following a report that the company is shari...

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